skill · foundations
Designer foundations
A six-week, ten-step path. By the end of it you have witnessed one named person's journey, drawn a flow with all four states, owned the copy of one change end-to-end, and watched the moment land. You are not a senior Designer. You are a Designer whose first cycle produced a moment the team can defend.
How a skill works in this corpus
A skill is not a reading list. It is a scaffolded sequence of read → practice → check → reflect, anchored to your real cycle. Bring a real story from your sprint to each step that asks for it.
Mastery looks like
When you finish this path, you can:
- Sit with a named person and draw their current journey on paper.
- Mark the steps of a journey the cycle is changing — and the ones it is not.
- Hand the team a flow with empty, loading, error, and success states.
- Own every string the change touches in a single copy doc.
- Distinguish a journey-level regression from a bug, in production.
Self-rating before you start
| 1 — Never | 3 — Sometimes | 5 — Default | |
|---|---|---|---|
| I draw the current journey before I design the new one | |||
| Every flow I ship has four states | |||
| I own every string the change touches | |||
| I refuse to design before the moment is named | |||
| I read the signal reading after my change lands |
Step 1 — Orient in the chain
Read: Before We Build · Person & Moment · Before We Build · Journey Mapping · The Map.
Practice prompt: in three sentences, explain why the journey is named before the flow.
Step 2 — Witness one person
Read: Before We Build · Observation.
Practice prompt: schedule one 90-minute observation session with a real named person who uses something the team built. Sit next to them. Sketch their current journey on paper, end to end. Do not redesign.
Mini-check: does your sketch mark at least one workaround the person has stopped noticing? If not, you were watching the screen.
Step 3 — Map a journey
Read: Before We Build · Journey Mapping.
Practice prompt: convert your observation into a journey map with J1…Jn. Mark friction with the three labels (cognitive / mechanical / domain-mismatch). Mark which J-steps the cycle is changing.
Output: the journey map, signed by the PO.
Step 4 — Co-sign a Feature Brief
Read: Before We Build · Feature Brief.
Practice prompt: sit at the brief session as part of the trio. Read the experience snapshot aloud. Refuse to sign if you can't recognise the person from your observation.
Pair task: ask the PO: what feeling should this person leave with? — write the answer next to the brief.
Step 5 — Draw the smallest flow
Read: What We Shape · Walking Skeleton.
Practice prompt: for the cycle's first story, draw the flow — empty, loading, error, success — on one page. Bring it to amigos.
Mini-check: if a state is missing because "we'll handle it later", later will be in production. Draw it.
Step 6 — Hold amigos for design
Read: What We Shape · Amigos & Gherkin.
Practice prompt: walk the flow at amigos. Bring at least one anti-flow ("what if the person does X instead?"). Seed at least one Gherkin scenario from your flow.
Step 7 — Own the copy
Read: As We Build · Domain Language in Code.
Practice prompt: every string the change touches — empty state, error, success, confirmation, the support DM. Write it. PO signs. Hand to the developer with the flow.
Pair task: ask the developer: which string in this doc would you have invented without me? — note the gap.
Step 8 — Watch the first 48 hours
Read: After We Build · The First 48 Hours.
Practice prompt: when the flag enables, watch the moment — not the metric. Did the person take the flow? Did the empty state ever fire? Where did the journey actually go?
Output: a journey-level note distinct from the bug report.
Step 9 — Read the signal next to the prediction
Read: After We Build · Signal & The Prediction.
Practice prompt: when the PO writes the signal reading, sit next to them. Add your one paragraph: did the moment land?
Mini-check: the metric and the lived experience can disagree. Trust the lived experience, not the metric.
Step 10 — Teach back, contribute back
Practice prompt: write a one-page guide for the next new Designer joining your team. What I wish I'd known before my first cycle. One page.
Authoring contribution: open a PR — sharpen one thing about how the corpus talks about the journey, the flow, or the copy.
Self-rating after: rate yourself again. Bring the gap to your next cycle.
After this path
- Designer · Practitioner (coming) — design system stewardship, accessibility leadership, multi-cycle journeys.
- Designer · Advanced (coming) — product-level design direction.
Stuck?
| If you got stuck at | Read |
|---|---|
| Step 2 — couldn't find someone to observe | When observation is impossible |
| Step 5 — flow grew past one screen | Slicing & Prioritization |
| Step 7 — engineering invented strings anyway | The copy doc didn't reach them — fix routing, not strings |